Cold

Cecilia Rosengren is Docent and Senior Lecturer in the History of Ideas and Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. Her research has focused on the interventions of early modern women philosophers in the public sphere, not least how their reflections on natural philosophy can offer alternative ways of relating to nature, knowledge and the human subject. The theme is studied, for example, in the book Conway – Naturfilosofi och kvinnliga tänkare i barockens tidevarv (2009) and the article “’Suppose a man be in a deep contemplative study’ Margaret Cavendish, Descartes’ Cogito and the Freedom of Thought” (2023). More recently, her research has focused on environmental and climate history, and how science, philosophy and art in the early modern period interacted in understanding and explaining cold phenomena in nature, as in “The wilderness of Allaert van Everdingen. Experience and representation of the north in the age of the baroque” (2020), and “Touching the Cold in the Little Ice Age - Reason and Fancy in Robert Boyle's and Margaret Cavendish's Writings on Northern Cold” (2023). Rosengren is the project leader of the ongoing project Freezing cold, Northern European imaginaries of winter, snow and ice during the Little Ice Age. Her subproject is about knowledge and imaginaries of Swedish winter before 1800.

Short bio: My research is particularly focused on the relation between art, politics and climate issues. I have published extensively on art, philosophy and critical theory. My book Doing Aesthetics with Arendt; How to See Things(Columbia University Press, 2015) looks at the way in which Hannah Arendt's reflections on art and aesthetics invite us to rethink her political concepts. My latest book Through the Eyes of Descartes; Seeing, Thinking, Writing (with Marcia Cavalcante Schuback, Indiana University Press 2024) looks at the relation between Descartes’ thought and climate issues. I am currently a research participant in the project "Freezing cold, Northern European imaginaries of winter, snow and ice during the Little Ice Age, led by Cecilia Rosengren (University of Githenburg), and I am one of the initiators of a new platform for research in the arts in times of climate change and societal transformation at Södertörn University, Art Forest.

I have worked extensively with questions of artistic research and artistic processes, as a collaborator with artists in research projects as well as a partner of dialogue in other ways. I am a member of the editorial board of Kultur & Klasse.

Robert W. Rix (Dr Phil., PhD) is full professor at the University of Copenhagen. I have published widely in several areas relating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Romanticism, politics, religion, language, nationalism, Nordic antiquarianism, and print culture/book history. I have published the monographs William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity (2007) and The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination: Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature (Routledge 2014), as well as edited several collections of articles. I am currently working on the Arctic. My latest books are The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy (CUP) and Nordic Terrors: Scandinavian Superstition in British Gothic Literature (Anthem).